In Practice
by blackberet
Summary: "How do we know more memories won't come flooding back? How do we know Revan won't suddenly turn on us?" Excellent question, Carth. A one-shot story about the relationship between FemRevan and Carth, set between KotOR I and KotOR II.


A/N: The light-side path toward the end of KotOR I requires your character to say, not just once but a number of times, that she (let's say she, since this is a FemRevan story) barely remembers anything of her life as Revan, that she's someone else now and Revan is dead. From KotOR II, though, we know that doesn't end up being true. Revan does recover her memories, and they have a huge impact on her future actions (and, indeed, on the galaxy). So what would that mean for her relationship with a man whose life her fleet destroyed? Well…

Just a note: this is definitely a separate continuity from "Downtime," my series of KotOR I short stories, in which I take a much more optimistic view of FemRevan and Carth's relationship. So if you're in the mood for something a little sweeter after reading this, please check out that story as well.

I don't own the KotOR games or their characters. The dialogue in the story description is indeed Carth's, cut or bugged out of the post-Leviathan scene in KotOR I.

* * *

"In Practice"

* * *

The first time she sits up in the middle of the night with a new memory, it's innocuous. The sound of her movement gets him wide-awake right away (he's more sharply attuned to her than he's ever been to anyone in his life; must be the Force), but when he turns to her in concern she's laughing. She remembered something that happened to her as a child at the Academy. She tries to tell him the story, but he quickly figures out that you had to be there to get it. So he just lets her enjoy the telling, and when she's done he dutifully cracks a grin at the punch line and lies back down with her, silently uneasy.

* * *

The next month goes just great, no more visions, and he's starting to think maybe they're in the clear when she has the second one. This time it's more ominous—she tells him about a woman with gray plaits and a long brown cloak with the hood thrown over her sightless eyes, who taught that helping others only weakens both oneself and them. Her Jedi Master, she says, but she can't remember the woman's name. He tells her anyone who'd say that doesn't sound like much of a Master, and after a long moment of furrowing her brow she agrees readily enough.

The third one comes in less than a week.

* * *

One of the early dreams he actually likes, when she repeats the remembered story for him in the darkness afterwards. It's about a promising young Jedi who trained at the same time she did, and what's come back to her is a prank they pulled together on one of the Masters. Something harmless, the kind of thing Carth himself used to do as a kid—no shades of the dark side here. She talks about that other Jedi in warm terms, and instead of feeling bothered by this resurrection of someone who might be her first love, Carth finds himself liking him. Good for someone to shake those self-assured Jedi Masters up once in a while.

But when she finishes the story he can feel how sad she is. He assumes it's just nostalgia, a moment of wistfulness over an innocent youth she can barely remember. "He sounds like a good guy," he tells her, trying to cheer her up; "what happened to him?"

"I killed him," she says. "That was Malak."

* * *

She promised she was someone else now, that she wasn't going to change back into Revan. He knows the memories aren't her fault—or maybe they are; you'd think all that Jedi training would mean she'd know how to block things like that out if she really wanted to—but he can't help feeling a bit resentful anyway. It had been so easy, with crisis looming over them and that sadness in her eyes, to offer her a future with him. And he does love her. Of course he loves her. She's saved the galaxy and made him feel like one of the living again. But—does she _have_ to keep dredging up the past?

It won't stop happening. After another two weeks of intermittent dreams he wakes to find her with her face buried in her hands, and he knows it was bad this time. When she looks up her eyes are haunted. Instantly he's angry with himself for ever doubting her, she's so clearly remorseful. It shouldn't matter what she remembers, as long as it doesn't change the way she is now.

She leans against him and whispers into his chest that it was the first time she killed a Jedi, and he cradles her in his arms the way he used to do when Dustil had a nightmare, those rare times he was actually around when his son was still young. Carth wonders if she's ever thought about the possibility of their having children together, the way he has. Not that a kid would fix all their problems—if they had problems—but having a family might be good for both of them, get them away from the decades of war and into real life. They're not too old yet.

Plenty of parents in the galaxy did things they'd rather forget in the wars. They wouldn't have to tell their child who his mother used to be.

* * *

Before long the visions are coming almost every night. Then every night, sometimes more than once. It's starting to interfere with his sleep, because right after each one she wakes up, needing to process what she's remembered, and if she can't talk to him then she'll get up and enter it into her datapad journal or a holorecorder and wake him up anyway, even if she goes into another room. She's starting to get reluctant to tell him about her dreams, but he presses her, thinking both that it might help her to talk and that he has a right to know. And he hasn't forgotten how many times she listened to him get things off his chest, years of residual guilt about his wife and Dustil and Saul.

The first time she remembers Saul is strange. It comes right on the heels of another harmless day of training when she was a child—her memory isn't coming back together linearly, but chunk by seemingly random chunk, except that he thinks they might be getting worse. She tells him about a meeting she and Saul had once, describing the admiral's mannerisms so precisely that Carth feels a shock run through him: she remembers his mentor better than he does. He keeps nodding at the right places and, for the first time, tries not to listen.

* * *

Maybe it's recalling Saul that triggers it. There's a night when she's up, the same as always, but instead of turning to him she lies down and stays silent. She rolls onto her side so he can't see her face, and when he reaches for her, her body is rigid with tension.

"Another bad one?" he asks.

"You don't want to hear about it." But she wants to get it out, he can tell.

He'd just as soon never have to hear about one of those visions again, but Carth is coming to accept that being her lover means being her exorcist. He squares his jaw. "Go on. I can take it," he says, although he doesn't feel as confident about that statement as he did the first time he used it—when he was telling her to use her worst insult on him, when he was sure she couldn't hurt him.

So she tells him about the day they decided to bomb his home world.

* * *

The shards sit on their bedroom floor for a week because they're both too angry to do anything about them. He stomps around the apartment in reinforced military boots; she just raises a hand when she walks past and all the fragments lift up off the ground, like a tiny fleet ready to follow her every order. When she's through she lets them fall right back where they were. She's using the Force like that a lot more often lately—for petty things, tasks she could easily do by hand. Or maybe she always did it and he just never noticed before.

They duck around each other, but it's a small apartment—not much bigger than the one they shared on Taris, before all this—and even with him decamped to another room to sleep, they only make it a day before they meet in the hallway to the fresher and she confronts him, almost pressed against him in the narrow space. Her eyes are blazing but not yellow. "You told me you could take it," she accuses.

"Can you blame me?" he fires back.

Evidently she can and does, because she turns her back to him and moves away.

After a week of this he cleans up the damn pieces himself, finds a guy to fix the window, and goes to a doctor about his hand, which has a network of cuts across it that she hasn't offered to heal. When he gets home she's by the door. He just stands there while she takes his hand and kisses the knuckles, not flinching at the taste of the kolto. "I'm sorry, Carth," she murmurs, though he can't tell what she's apologizing for.

* * *

For a while they've reached a peace agreement. He wakes up less often—could be that he's getting used to her being up at night or that she's getting used to being quiet about it. It isn't that the connection between them is weakening.

He suspects there's a lot she isn't telling him. Sometimes he comes home from that damn desk job he took to be with her and finds that she's been sleeping ever since he left, trying to get the memories to come. He tries to tell her that's no way for someone like her to live, but she shuts him up by asking pointedly what else she's supposed to do all day. Carth doesn't have an answer. She has no right to blame him for her decision to leave the Order. He never asked her to trade in her lightsaber for him. In fact, if either of them should be resentful, it's him. Dustil will never forgive him for her.

But he isn't the mood for another argument like the last one, so he lets it go in favor of upholding the truce. Like everyone else in the galaxy, he's learned it's better not to fight her.

* * *

Right after she tells him about her army's victory at Dxun, she rolls him into the mattress and takes him with a passion so strong it's almost inhuman, and he's not sure whether she's trying to shut the memories out or being fueled by them. He's afraid to ask.

* * *

After that the dam breaks and they're assaulted by memories of the wars. He learns what she was doing during all those battles, the ones he fought in alongside her forces, against them, the ones he only heard about by way of statistics. It's all coming back to her. A smarter guy might try to pick the brain of the military genius in his bed, but Carth doesn't care about being smart; he wants to be done with the wars. He thought _she_ was done with the wars. He starts having flashbacks of his own, nightmares, and he's already had more of those than any one person should have to stomach in a lifetime, damn it.

One night he finds himself bolt upright in bed with the air of panic around them, but it wasn't her vision that awakened him; it was his. He's remembering screaming for the medics. She's sitting up too, so damned calm. She doesn't ask him about his dream.

"Malachor V," she says, talking about hers. Her tone is unreadable.

* * *

They have another fight, of course. He tells her he can't take it anymore. This wasn't what he signed on for. He doesn't know who she is now. He thought he was giving her a future, and instead she's giving him a past, every damn day more revelations about how she single-handedly screwed up the galaxy. He regrets that last one as soon as he says it, but this time he doesn't back down. How can she be so casual about all those lives?

The first epithet she spits out is _weak_, and she follows it in the same breath with _whiny_, _sniveling_ and _cowardly_. Her insults have gotten better.

Carth never knew it was possible to be as angry as he gets at that, which, ironically, gives him a flash of insight into her as sudden and painful as a blaster bolt. He's told her everything; was this what she was thinking the whole time? Part of him wants to hurt her, make her pay for it all, but he can't—because he wouldn't, he loves her. But also because she's too strong to let him.

* * *

She stops telling him about her visions, but it doesn't matter. There isn't much left to remember by then.

* * *

When she tells him she's leaving, he earns her approval by taking it like a soldier. Or maybe like a warrior, which she'd like even better; he knows she went to see that damned smirking Mandalorian. She says she can't take anyone she loves. It's a good thing he never got around to asking her about a family, because he's decided to accept that promotion the admiral's been offering him. Before long neither of them will be around. He's glad he won't make the mistake of fathering another virtual orphan.

He leaves instructions with T3 about finding help for her if she gets in trouble, but he isn't holding out much hope. She'll be changed even more out there, they both know, and the cynical side of him thinks that even if she comes back, it won't surprise him if she brings another armada with her as a souvenir. Their last moments at the dock are awkward, even more strained than their first meeting. As he kisses her for the last time, he wonders if she'll miss him, or if she's beyond such weak emotions now.

He watches the Ebon Hawk until it vanishes into the sky, and then he goes inside and tracks it until it's out of the range of his instruments. Then he lies down on the bed, letting his limbs sprawl out into her empty space, and he feels sad but overwhelmingly relieved. It's so much easier to love her when she's gone.


End file.
